(annoyances, episodes)

They climb aboard at 49th Street. “Moe” and his two stooge companions, rocking the train with loud, garrulous poses…Assertively, spread-legged to keep their balance, the three commence shouting and sharing their work day: “Wait, we’re going downtown or uptown now?”

“Downtown,” one of the others responds.

“This is which train?”

“The R”.

The third of this astute triumverate adds, “If you learn anything on this job, know where you are,” he emphasizes. “Always.”

As I write, there is a noisy, messy creature tearing agitatedly through her homeless bag.

I want to take her photograph. I want to steal that bag and take time sifting through its contents: How did she become this way? Where did those belongings come from? Apparently of enough sentiment to her (tethered to some better days?), so that she wrestles and tears through them, agitatedly.

Hopeful still, she wakes each day. Maybe prays, finds some comfort, a warm cup of dignity…

She tries to concentrate. She’s got her book and glass of vino…She sips languidly, though, someplace else. She laughs, and then she shakes her head.

Her book tents on the table now. She’s pissed ’cause she can’t smoke here. She’s all furious, and looking for someone to turn her anger on. He’ll do, she seems to reckon…Turns and snipes his way unsexily.

“Oh, so you like that TV?” he asks…squeezing so his bad chicken breath’s tight behind her.

She whirls to face the foul offender. Sees he’s a cop, or a guard of some sort. “Hi,” she feels compelled to say; then leave her window shopping…

Forced to scurry away down Broadway.

At another intersection, yet another interruption: stops and plants himself mid-sidewalk, turns and mumbles to the pair of single legs strolling behind him. Asks her, “What you said?”

…Apparently, he ‘doesn’t hear her’. Doesn’t hear the silence…

“Oh, I thought…”, as she bumps into him.

You thought? C’mon man! Costumed bozo! What she said, be “You at work now. You can’t talk, or hit on me! I might pass by this way a little later, at the end of your eight or ten hour ‘beat’, who knows…